Verizon Faces Query in Emergency-Call Failure in Washington Area

July 2 (Bloomberg) -- Verizon Communications Inc. faces
questioning from U.S. regulators over outages to 911 emergency
call services after storms in the eastern U.S. cut electrical
power for more than 4 million customers.

The 911 service run by Verizon in Fairfax County, Virginia,
failed following the storms that knocked out power on June 29
and “it’s not completely restored,” Merni Fitzgerald, a
spokeswoman for the locality, home to 1.08 million people near
Washington, D.C., said in an interview today.

Residents in Fairfax and adjoining Prince William County
were told to call alternate phone numbers, send e-mails or drive
to a police or fire station if they had an emergency, according
to a report by WRC-TV, the Washington-area affiliate of Comcast
Corp.’s NBC Universal. There were no reported deaths, the
station said in an article posted on its website.

“We plan to meet with a number of carriers in the coming
weeks to explore the cause of service issues to 911 service
centers,” David Turetsky, chief of the Federal Communications
Commission’s Public Safety and Homeland Security Bureau, said in
an e-mailed statement.

The emergency network stopped early June 30 after a
commercial power failure at a Verizon building that houses
switching equipment and winds blew down lines, Harry Mitchell, a
company spokesman, said in an interview. Service was partly
restored in both counties June 30, and fully restored in Prince
William County yesterday and in Fairfax County today, Mitchell
said.

“We’re pretty much back up,” Mitchell said. “We’ll do a
detailed analysis.”

The FCC asked Verizon to explain its failure to connect
10,000 calls to 911 centers in the Washington area during a
snowstorm in January 2011, and said it wanted the company to
investigate the extent of the outage across its network.